Which company is the client more likely to contact?
Even if Company B is more expensive, the customer may well choose it — it is obvious that Company B knows what it's doing and has experience.
It is necessary to understand that content marketing is an effective way to attract traffic and leads, but it is far from a silver bullet. For this tool to work, you need to put a lot of effort, money, and knowledge into it. It is almost impossible to achieve serious success in a few months. For example, it once took six months for our blog to yield us the desired results. Now, this marketing channel is number one for Kraftblick, and the results are more than satisfying, but the price was very high (both financially and morally).
We do not recommend companies use the agile approach in the spirit of "let's try this for a month, and then we will see." Unfortunately, nothing good will be seen in a month.
Content Creation: A Step-by-Step Guide You decided to try content marketing and start with publishing catchy articles on a corporate blog. What's next?
Step 1 Select the target audience and make a portrait of the buyer persona. Why do you need a buyer persona? It is needed for writing content not just for an abstract audience but also for people who can become real customers.
Many companies still have blogs with a mash-up of articles such as "How Our Friendly Team Celebrated the 8th March" or "How to Code an Airplane on Java and Fly Away to Distant Lands." Such articles are unlikely to bring in customers because they were written for another audience. From a practical point of view, the buyer portrait is needed to develop good topics later and not lose course during the subsequent writing of the article.
How do you make a portrait of a buyer? There are many instructions on the internet, from simple checklists to automatic generators. These guidelines suggest creating portraits with the entire background of the average reader, from family and social status to favorite books and TV shows. And, of course, do not forget to find a photograph of a particular person that the buyer persona should be associated with.
In theory, this method seems reasonable because we can get into the role of the customer and produce fascinating articles. However, after making up a couple of dozen buyer portraits in the standard way, we concluded that these methods do not work well in real life.
We came up with a dozen topics which were, in our opinion, supposed to be very interesting to our potential customers. Then we sent them to our customers with a request for honest comments on how interesting these topics are. The answer was, "Not very." As a result, we decided on the following method of creating a portrait of a buyer (and it worked):
1. Estimate the basic demographics: age, country, position. For example, a CTO, 45 years old, living in the USA (CTO, 45, US).
2. Look for specific problems and challenges that potential customers face. There is a good hack here: instead of trying to extort the hypothetical problems of a person who is probably thousands of miles away in a country with different cultures and customs, find job offerings and determine the solutions the employer expects to see from our customers. To do so, go to job websites (we used
Indeed) and fill in the search bar with the desired position.